Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Ariel Delgado Dixon’s novel Sourland is an immersive literary thriller, brilliantly original and atmospheric.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“[A] gritty neo-Western, complete with double crosses, shootouts, rattletrap pickup trucks, a herd of cattle, and a dog named Pistol . . . Dixon’s wealth of knowledge about both legal and illegal farming practices and her feel for the texture of rural queer living infuse this sweaty, smoky thriller with vibrant realism . . . Skunky, in the best possible way.”

In her own words, here is Ariel Delgado Dixon’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Sourland:

Sourland is a novel about being sticky-stuck in the thrall of weed: growing it, making money off it, and hacking out a life beyond the law. It’s also a novel about love.

While getting stoned is pretty fun, reading about it is usually a bore. I may or may not have spent my fair share of time inside the underground world of weed, but in writing Sourland, I was less interested in the psychedelic than in the foot soldiers of old-school marijuana: the growers, trimmers, and unsung middlemen. I love their stories. Farmers get up to some crazy shit. There are a dozen ways to die on a farm, and when your cash crop happens to be illegal, off-grid, and potentially worth millions, these dangers only multiply.

Growing marijuana attracts a certain kind of freedom-loving freak—replete with their own customs and codes of honor. At the novel’s heart, that’s what Sourland is all about. I wanted to preserve this slice of subculture, and also prod at a foundational question. How do you build a meaningful life, and who gets to say what that looks like? 

Here are thirteen tracks, set to Sourland’s ebbs and flows of love, loss, redemption, and weed.

SIDE A – In which the players meet, fall in love, out of love, hate each other, want each other, and decide whether or not to blow everything up.

“Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin

Would a novel set in the deep woods of Northern California be complete without a throwback track like this? Humboldt County remains the U.S. epicenter for growing primo weed. It’s outlaw country up there, through and through. A gnarled guitar riff as opener feels spiritually correct.

“No More ‘I Love You’s’” by Annie Lennox

One of my favorite chapters in Sourland follows two characters as they begin an elaborate adventure following their one-night stand. Sapphire, the matriarch of an illegal weed farm, encounters Frankie, a disgraced ballerina searching for something big to sink her teeth into. However different Sapphire and Frankie are, they somehow fit together, these two circlers of the void. The absurdist sweep of what is perhaps Annie Lennox’s most famous song feels like getting carried away, “outside words” as the song goes. Isn’t that like falling in love?

“Total Control” by The Motels

The languid heartbeat thump of this track is positively delicious. I always imagined it overlaying an early chapter in the book in which we see Frankie and Sapphire tumble headlong into fresh passion, all those early days of obsession. I’d sell my soul for / total control is such a brilliant turn of lyrical irony. Did I mention this song contains a lengthy sax solo?

“Wrecking Ball” by Gillian Welch

With respect to Miley Cyrus, this is the superior “Wrecking Ball.” It doesn’t hurt that Sourland, in my humble hope, could read like an expansion of this Northern California odyssey of love, farming, misty mornings, and a girl who showed me colors I’d never seen.

“Fruits of My Labor” Lucinda Williams

Nobody does it like Lucinda. Is this one of the greatest love songs of all time? I’ve been tryin’ to enjoy / all the fruits of my labor/ I been cryin’ for you boy / but truth is my savior. The truth is also a killer. In Sourland, so much consternation comes from loving someone even when you know their love is no good for you anymore.

“Transcendental Blues” by Steve Earle

Sure, Sourland is a novel is full of sex and heartache—all the fecundity of love—but it’s also about hustling. Farming exacts its tolls, but on the best days, it can also feel like sun-bleached bliss. Back roads never carry you where you want ‘em to, Steve Earle delivers in his delightful snarl, but the up-and-down electric riff that climbs throughout this track feels like persistence.

“What About Me” by The Exceptional Three

At the center of Sourland is a toxic-ish love triangle. There’s Sapphire and Frankie in their love nest, but there is also Fizz—a former college ballplayer turned regional kingpin, who has failed at both endeavors. When Fizz arrives on the farm, romantic allegiances quickly go fuzzy. Soon, three is a crowd. I love the shiftiness of a love triangle. Maybe it’s unevolved to say so, but I think a little jealousy is good for a love affair.

SIDE B ­ – In which the players do, in fact, decide to blow everything up.

“Fistful of Love” by Antony and the Johnsons

I first heard this track play at a friend’s homestead in deep northern Maine, the horns echoing out of the house and into the pine woods. This song is a haunt. Maybe it’s about domination, or violence, or the pleasures of possession—or a mix of all the above. Love is illogical. I imagine this track kicking off the SIDE B of this playlist, the second half of the novel. In the margins of love and the extralegal, we learn what we’re truly capable of. 

“Kool Thing” by Sonic Youth

There is a standalone chapter of Sourland that functions like a kind of bottle episode. The reader gets a blast from the past transport to northern Idaho and learns the inner workings of illegal weed. Even in our modern era of tap-to-pay and online banking, there is the thriving underbelly of the cash world and its deadly rules. Some of my favorite bits of writing Sourland were bringing those details to life, like the boobytraps around illicit grows, made by dangling fish hooks from trees; or the real-life pizza delivery drug ring that tried to deliver an eighth and a pizza in thirty minutes or less. I

“Bloody Motherfucking Asshole” by Martha Wainwright

You can’t top this track title, and the song is surprisingly yearning and earnest. It’s all smoke, there’s no more fire / only desire/ for you, whoever you are. Even when characters do bad, I want to believe they are good, or at least, that they want to be good. The novel has no shortage of people behaving badly, taking deadly chances, exacting pain—but there is also a code, always, even among outlaws.

“Emergency Blimp” by King Krule

I’ve been a King Krule head for a long time. I like seeing this puny looking redhead rip like a badass. I picture this track backing one of the final chapters of the novel, wherein our main characters give and receive their comeuppance.

“At Last” by Neko Case

Short, sweet, unstructured. This track feels like an epilogue. Neko Case is a master lyricist and nothing kills me more than that last line: I own every bell that tolls me. Without giving too much away, the final chapter of the Sourland takes a hard left to some uncharted territory. I remember writing it in one go, perched at the edge of my seat, my fingers trying to keep up with the words in my head.

“All the World is Green” by Tom Waits

Is any playlist complete without a little Tom Waits? A poet with the croon of a lifelong smoker. No one can better deliver the killer, Sourland-defining lines: The face forgives the mirror / the worm forgives the plow / the questions begs the answer / can you forgive me somehow / maybe when our story’s over / we’ll go where it’s always spring / the band is playing our song again / all the world is green. For a book about love, weed, and loss it doesn’t get more dead-on than this.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Ariel Delgado Dixon was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. She is the author of the novels Sourland and Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she works in farming and teaches writing.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Ru Marshall’s American Trickster is an exhaustively researched and fascinating biography of Carlos Castaneda.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Marshall reveals in this detailed, well-documented, and revelatory biography, early suspicions . . . that Castaneda’s writings are mostly, if not entirely, fictional.”

In their own words, here is Ru Marshall’s Book Notes music playlist for their book American Trickster:

I often listen to music while I write—but not the music I’ve included in this playlist (almost all of which would be far too distracting). The songs I’ve chosen are those which I’ve imagined appearing on a fantasy soundtrack for an imagine film about Carlos Castaneda, songs that evoke various people and places that appear in the book. A brief synopsis so that what follows has some context: Castaneda was a faux-anthropologist at UCLA who, at the tail end of the psychedelic sixties, pulled off the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century. His admirers ranged from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Gilles Deleuze to Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, who wrote that Castaneda “brought in a new level of awareness” that Castaneda wielded words “like a machete.” For five years his work went largely unchallenged—not until Joyce Carol Oates questioned whether his books were in fact novels did his reputation start to fade. In his second act, he became the leader of a cult; he and his “witches” taught Tensegrity, a movement technique they claimed offered the possibility of eternal life. American Trickster is also the story of the women who were pulled into his web, five of whom disappeared following his death and are widely believed to have taken their own lives to follow him into the next dimension.

“Carnavalito (Humahuanqueño)” by Sukay

Castaneda was born and raised in the then remote Peruvian city of Cajamarca, high in the Andes. Cajamarca was the site of perhaps the most pivotal encounter in Peruvian history—that between the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Incan emperor Atahualpa, whom Pizarro had strangled in the Plaza de Armas, some one hundred yards from the location of the house where Castaneda was born. No event is more important in Cajamarca than Carnival (Cajamarca’s is the largest and most fantastic in Peru). “Carnavalito, (El Humahuaqueño)” written by Edmundo Zaldivar, performed here by the Andean folk music band Sukay, beautifully evokes how grief and celebration are woven together in Andean culture: “because I’m unhappy/I live crying/Pum, pum carnavalito/all the people come dance.” Indeed, in carnival, indigenous and catholic symbolism merge, and there’s a vast literature on Carnival as a reenactment of historical trauma and mode of resistance. When Castaneda was growing up, months, if not the entire year, would be spent in preparation, making the masks that everyone would wear. People would transform into animals; devil masks were particularly popular, and the features of these devils were those of the conquerors. In my book, I try to explore how historical trauma is passed down; noth masks and devils would be central to Castaneda’s work. Though the importance of the latter was, at first, quite deeply concealed.

“The Old Revolution” by Leonard Cohen

I titled the first part of American Trickster after Leonard Cohen’s The Old Revolution. Castaneda’s parents, Susana and César Nemesio Arana, were Apristas, followers of the revolutionary leftist leader Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Their revolution failed, the family had to go into hiding, and this experience was one of the factors that led Castaneda to a philosophy that disdained collective action, to the belief that the true revolution was internal, a transformation of personal consciousness. While writing American Trickster, I began to feel great empathy for Castaneda’s parents, in particular for Susana; I titled the book’s opening section The Old Revolution after a song by Leonard Cohen, in which he sings “I was very young then/and thought that we were winning.” American Trickster begins with the failed revolution of Castaneda’s parents, but is also very much about the failed idealism of his followers, and how that idealism was betrayed. It was for this reason that Cohen’s song resonated deeply for me.

“Jungla” by Yma Sumac 

Yma Sumac, Castaneda’s near contemporary, rose to fame in the 1950s on the strength of her near five octave vocal range and her exoticized self-presentation (she was marketed by Hollywood as an Incan princess, the descendent of the Emperor Atahualpa). By the time I first encountered her music in the 1980s, she had become a gay camp icon, and was widely rumored to be, in reality, “Amy Camus” from Brooklyn. (A signed poster from a performance I went to is among my prized possessions.) I was thus surprised and delighted when, on my first trip to Peru in 2011, I learned that she had, in fact, grown up just outside of Cajamarca. And is, in all likelihood, after Castaneda, Cajamarca’s most famed cultural export. She was three years older than Carlos. Did their paths cross? Unknowable, but not improbable. She was born Zoila Chávarri Castillo; like Carlos, who was born César Arana, hers is a tale of fabulous self-reinvention, predicated in no small part on North American gullibility and her audience’s need to exoticize an “Indian” other. This song, “Jungla,” is Sumac at her over-the-top best.

“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane

I chose this 1967 song for reasons obvious and not. “White Rabbit,” which appears on the album “Surrealistic Pillow,” is based on images from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Despite the not-entirely-convincing denials of singer Grace Slick, it was widely understood as an anthem of the psychedelic era.

That’s the obvious level. There are others. Certainly Castaneda’s readers often felt they had gone down a rabbit hole. Those who knew him personally sometimes felt like they had ended up in an incomprehensible, upside-down world. I too, writing about Carlos, often felt lost. So there’s that. Also of significance: the song is possibly equally well remembered for having provided the title to the 1971 book Go Ask Alice, which was marketed as the diary of an anonymous young woman’s hellish descent into drug addiction. It was later revealed that it was, like Castaneda’s books, a novel that had been marketed as nonfiction (the author, Beatrice Sparks, is reported to have been a Mormon youth counselor and serial con artist). 

“Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” by Joni Mitchell

The lyrics to this song which appears onthe 1976 album of the same name, are among her most cryptic and obscure. Try as I might, I can’t puzzle them out. Suffice to note that don Juan was the name of Castaneda’s fictional shaman, who, in his books, instructs the young anthropologist not just in the use of peyote, mushrooms, and datura, but also in a mode of consciousness that, supposedly, had never before been shared with a “westerner.” Mitchell’s biographer, David Yaffe, calls the entire album “a response to Carlos Castaneda,” and suggests that the following words from his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, had particular meaning for Joni: “The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”

“La Dolce Vita” by Nino Rota

Perhaps no episode in Castaneda’s story is more unsettling than that of his  encounter with the great director Federico Fellini. Fellini, a devoted fan, had, for years, been trying to contact Carlos; he wanted to obtain the film rights to his books. Finally, in 1984, he was able to make contact. Fellini, who rarely left Italy, flew to Los Angeles to meet Carlos, who then sent him on a wild goose chase through Mexico in search of don Juan. The humiliating and (at least in Fellini’s mind) supernatural events that occurred during this trek would haunt Fellini for the rest of his life. Thus this track from the soundtrack to Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita.

“Fame” by David Bowie

Castaneda had, before the 1968 publication of The Teaching of Don Juan, taken significant strides down a very dark path. But his sudden ascent to international fame in the wake of The Teachings of Don Juan confirmed his darkest intuitions. It showed him that he was indeed, as he had covertly suggested in the opening pages of that book, “the chosen man.” The chosen student of a teacher who we learn—if we read with care—is a diablero. A sorcerer in service to the forces of darkness. Who is rewarded for his Faustian pact by being given tremendous power. But whose fate is now locked in. Hence this song.

“Went to see the Gypsy” by Bob Dylan

In the 1990s, Castaneda emerged as a full-on cult leader. Followers were instructed to leave behind families, jobs, friends. He and his three “witches,” Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs held seminars around the world, teaching Tensegrity, a movement technique they claimed had been passed down by twenty five generations of Toltec shamans. The movements were, in fact, often arrived at in a hotel room shortly before they went on stage. In Went to see the Gypsey, Bob Dylan’s problematically titled but nevertheless concise and evocative song, the narrator goes to see “the gypsy”—substitute, if you will, “guru” or “cult leader,” who is “staying in a big hotel.” In a dark and crowded room, the gypsy makes cryptic remarks. The narrator goes downstairs to make a phone call. There he encounters a “pretty dancing girl” who encourages him to go back up to the gypsy. The gypsy, she tells him, “can drive you from your fear.” And, as he did in Vegas. He can “bring you through the mirror.” The narrator returns to the gypsy’s room, but the gypsy has gone. This song beautifully captures the fleeting razzle dazzle showmanship of Castaneda’s group in the 90s, and the devotion of the young Tensegrity instructors who surrounded him.

“Sinnerman” by Nina Simone

Castaneda, early in his life, having read Nietzsche, made the choice to reject all conventional morality. This led him down a very dark road. In writing American Trickster, I had to grapple with the question of evil. What is it? From whence does it arise? I have no answers (other than that it seems to me inextricable from pride, which is always the flip side of shame). I do, however, have songs. One of which is Sinnerman, written by Les Baxter and Will Holt, immortalized in a recording made by Nina Simone in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement. During his final months, at the same time that he was encouraging his followers to leave with him for the next dimension, it seems that he was also, at moments, trying to find another form of redemption (even the evil are filled with contradictions). He reached out to a former disciple, asking her forgiveness. That was something, she told him, she could not provide. Only the higher power that he’d spent his life rejecting could provide that. Simone’s sinnerman, facing final judgment, seeks refuge behind a rock. But the rock will not hide him. He seeks refuge from a river. But the river will not hide him.  “So I run to the Lord,” the sinnerman sings. “Please hide me Lord.” But the Lord will not. “Go to the Devil,” the Lord commands. Although my book will be understood as highly critical of Castaneda—and more relevantly, of those in the publishing industry and academia who abetted (and continue to abet) his deception—I also believe he was, in the end, a deeply tormented soul.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Ru Marshall’s novel, A Separate Reality, was released by Carroll & Graf in 2006 and was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. Their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Barcelona Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from BIO, the Biographers International Organization. Their visual work has been exhibited at Participant Inc., Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Studio 10 Gallery, Art in General, White Columns, Baxter Street, Cathouse Proper, and numerous other venues. They have received grants and fellowships from Macdowell, Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Keely Jobe’s novel The Endling is a surreal, unsettling, and engaging debut.

Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:

“An electric and unnerving novel, The Endling follows a radical feminist community’s undoing.”

In her own words, here is Keely Jobe’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Endling:

I remember being moved by music at a really young age. When I was around five, I used to hide behind one of the speakers in our house and listen to ‘I dreamed a dream’ from Les Misérables and cry quietly to myself. I remember kind of enjoying the total despair the music offered, and which I can now recognize was a kind of catharsis. When I was writing The Endling, music was such a significant part of the process. I used it to get a sense of the culture I was depicting, to describe the state of particular characters, and more than anything else, to locate the atmosphere and emotion in a scene. It might come as no surprise that this playlist includes very few men.

X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage Up Yours!

There’s a sneaky mention of this song in the book. It’s such an awesome song, I play it way too much. Partly influenced by reggae but unmistakably punk, this band sums up that anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, liberationist energy of the 70s. The lead singer, Poly Styrene, is still considered a pioneer of feminist punk. She’s a black woman screaming about bondage and freedom so it’s impossible not to feel energized and outraged when you’re listening to her.  I also love how crappy the recording is, how discordant the saxophone, how shrill the vocals. It’s the epitome of disorder.

The Slits, Typical Girls

When I was researching second-wave feminism and Radicalesbians in Australia, I was struck by how theatrical a lot of their activism was. There were women joining punk bands but there were also women joining street theatre troupes to play out their politics to the public. The Slits embody that cultural moment for me. The name of the band says it all – prepare to be affronted. This isn’t the kind of music you can sing along to, it’s too choppy and dissonant, but it captures a very particular sentiment: it’s defiant and confrontational, and underneath it all is a real sense of frustration at the status quo.  

Grace Cummings, Storm Queen

How do you write a group of women feeling sexually attracted to a forest? Listen to Grace Cummings. Hers is one of the most eerily seductive voices out there. When I first heard this song on the radio, I remember saying, ‘Who is this?!’ and turning the volume right up. This song is like a spell, and I played it a number of times to get into that supernatural headspace. If you ever get a chance to see Grace play live, don’t hesitate. You won’t regret it.

PJ Harvey and John Parish, Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen

I played this song on repeat when I was writing the birth scene. The lyrics don’t clearly point to something like mass birth but there’s a sense of dizziness and excess in the instrumentation I was able to piggyback off. The banjo always sounds a bit hick and rural. In this song, it’s also an invitation to chaos.

Karen Dalton, Katie Cruel

I heard this song about 20 years ago and I remember seeing a character in my mind back then: a woman on the move, someone who upsets people wherever she goes. She doesn’t fit in well, doesn’t conform, and it’s probably best for everyone if she just sticks to herself. When I was researching feminist separatist projects, I found examples of women who joined these projects not for community but for isolation. That’s what this song says to me – leave me the hell alone. It’s Frank through and through.

The Platters, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Just before I started writing this book, my partner was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Some of her early symptoms were so strange, and they make up a part of Frankie’s story. Where I live in Tasmania, treatment for MS is effective and accessible (it’s free) because it’s an MS hotspot, but I wondered what would happen if a person never got that treatment. I read that one rare symptom of MS is auditory hallucinations, which sometimes take the form of music. This song was one of my grandma’s favourites – it really tugs on my heartstrings for that reason – and it’s the song that gets stuck in Frankie’s head when she’s getting sick.

Divinyls, Back to the Wall

In one scene, Mila wonders what life would be like if she left the mountain. She’s feeling very out of the loop, especially in terms of pop-culture. If she did leave the mountain and entered early 90s Australia, she’d be confronted by Chrissy Amphlett’s sneering, schoolgirl persona, fronting the timeless band Divinyls. She might even find this particular song sums up her experience of motherhood on the mountain.

Björk, All is Full of Love

I have been a massive Björk fan since forever. I find her work so generative when it comes to my own writing. Her lyrics are always opening doors for me, partly because they’re so enigmatic. This song speaks to me of the novel’s ending, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say it’s a song that blooms into something beautiful and strange.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Keely Jobe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction living on the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania with her partner and two staffies. Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Australian Geographic, and Cosmos. She has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and is the nonfiction editor at Island Magazine. The Endling is her first novel. Keely lives in Tasmania.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal is a masterfully told memoir that utilizes a mesmerizing mix of poetry, prose, and photographs.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Making her first trip to her ancestral homeland, Eleni slowly reveals an unconventional family history in an intriguing blend of poetry, prose, performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction accompanied by archival and family photographs.”

In her own words, here is Eleni Sikelianos’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Memory Rehearsal:

In the last few years of working on Memory Rehearsal, which took my 25 years to write, a handful of albums pulled me through. Because the book is about ancestors, I needed music that had a certain ritual vibe to it. I was trying to make sense of my great grandparents’ endeavors to bring about world peace via a wild artistic endeavor, a history I had been cut off from. My great grandmother, Evelina Palmer (1874-1952), “was an American heiress obsessed with the ancient Greeks. A poem, a vase, a song — if it was busted or missing parts it inspired her.” My great grandfather, Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951), “was a poet obsessed with Ancient Greece as well as the Greeks of his time. He was sure he could hear the thrum of his own blood in the cicadas screaming in the trees, and the sound revealed marriages between past and future, the muses and humans.” These two spent a good portion of their lives devoted to a dream of healing national and psychic wounds, reviving the festivals and plays at Delphi, in two three-day festivals that occurred at the ancient site in Delphi in 1927 and 1930. Eva spent her entire fortune on this endeavor, and ended up homeless yet still trying to carry out her dream at the end of her life. The book is about many things, but one of them is my discovery of this past I knew very little about, since my access to it had been severed in the intervening generations.

Sappho de Mytilene, Angélique Ionatos and Nena Venetsanou (sung in Modern Greek, in translations by poet Odysseas Elytis)

One of Eva’s first Ancient Greek obsessions was Sappho. Like many lesbians of her time, she found in Sappho a queer ancestral past that offered a lesbian present tense. Many of Sappho’s fragmented poems had recently been discovered in a trash heap in Oxyrhynchus (modern Al-Bahnasa) in Middle Egypt, and these scraps ignited their imaginations. Eva set about teaching herself, and then her lovers, Ancient Greek.

One song among the stunning renditions on this album, “Pali pali…”  (“again, again”) is a version of Sappho’s Fragment 130, which comes to us not from papyri trash, but from the ancient grammarian Hephaestion’s second century C.E. Handbook on Meters, where he quotes it.

Πάλη πάλη ο έρωτας – again, again, love, begins this sung version, whereas Sappho’s original (as far as Hephaestion’s quote of it is original) goes:

Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.

which Anne Carson offers as:

Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me —
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

This is the poem in which the compound “bittersweet” (γλυκύπικρον) is invented, though it’s actually “sweetbitter,” as Anne Carson points out in Eros the Bittersweet. That order is important because love is sweet first then bitter, as when the beloved flees. Eva’s stormy love affair with Natalie Barney certainly followed that order of things. Still, the two of them, with an army of lovers, set about rewriting the sanitized Victorian version of Sappho, which had rendered her a lover of men.

Some translators have love crawling in the dust in this fragment rather than “stealing in,” because that last word, “orpeton,” is the word we get herpetology from — referring to snakes and other slithering things— your limbs have been so seized by love you can only crawl in the dirt. Others take it as the verb for a bee who steals through the air, like Eros, with his wings, his honey, and his sting.

Mu, Don Cherry

For when I needed energy, drive.

Gamelan Music, Lou Harrison (1917-2003)

What a rich rabbit hole.

For this book, I was listening to ghosts. My great grandfather, Angelos, a bit of an attention-hog in life, seemed to want to speak to me even from the dead, while my great grandmother, Eva, announced her presence only with a faint tinkling of bells. Beautifully rhythmic yet ethereal, Harrison’s “Preludes” were often able to call her forth. Gamelan was invented to summon the gods, so it makes sense that these pieces beckoned an ancestral ghost. An astonishing person — somewhat self-taught and therefore less subject to boundary-thinking, Harrison came out to his family before coming out was a thing (in 1934). He was Cage’s sometimes lover and collaborator, and a collaborator and friend of poet-translator Kenneth Rexroth. Like Eva, he was a queer, politically engaged American resistant to the American mainstream, bringing together various cultural influences (he was fluent in Esperanto, Mandarin, and ASL). A student of the great Javanese gamelan master Kanjeng Notoprojo, Harrison began to create his own instruments from tin cans and aluminum furniture tubing. The pieces on this album are beautiful, sometimes forceful meditations, melodic congregations that move the imagination along in cyclical clusters. Since the book follows temporal swirls rather than forcing an arrow of time, these sonic landscapes were fantastic mechanisms for writing. They are also, in the rare pieces that include language, piercingly political, and like Eva’s work, dedicated to art’s engagement with justice and peace. The super short “Ode on Bravo Twenty”[*] begins, “The untied snakes of America drive down with stinking speed-and-gleam to pierce sweet ancient things…”

Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno

This album is like a Pavlovian signal — I put it on, I write.

Musique de la Grèce Antique, Gregorio Paniagua

Gregorio Paniagua’s passion for early music led him to found his own workshop in which he recreated ancient instruments and songs based on drawings in manuscripts, vase paintings, and musical notations from Oxyrhynchus papyri. This album, for which he constructed ancient Greek instruments, was made in conjunction with restorative work of the Acropolis in 1978. These songs, less troubled and troubling than the Acropolis restorations, include an ode to the Pythia, the mythic snake guarding the oracle at Delphi.

Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore

Poet Carolina Ebeid (see her recent book, Hide) turned me onto this one. The harp. Listen to the moody “‘Til a Mermaid Drags you Under,” accompanied by guitarist Neil Halstead. Would love to collaborate with her one day.

“The Hymn of Kassiani,” by Kassiani (Sung by Nektaria Karantzi [and many others] in Medieval Greek)

In 2025, I was lucky enough to be in Athens on a Holy Tuesday, and went to the Church of St. Dimitrios Lombardiaris near the Hill of the Muses (just down from the Acropolis), designed by the amazing architect Pikionis, to hear the cantor sing Kassiani’s hymn. Kassiani (c. 810-c. 865) is the only known woman poet-composer whose work is used in the Byzantine liturgy. I sought the microtones with eyes closed against the candles lit all around. Eva first left for Greece because she heard a young Greek woman sing such a hymn in Paris. Following that song, her whole life changed permanently, forever. Besides her Delphic Festival endeavors, she invented an organ, a Panharmonium she called it, that would capture all the microtones in Eastern music, from Greece to India, in her ongoing search to preserve precolonial traditions and bringing cultures together. With her lover Kurshed Naoroji, she hoped to start a music school, but their plans were demolished with the outbreak of the Second World War. About hearing the song in Athens, I write, “The psalter’s throat clutched and freed the O’s as if they were eggs. Each vowel pulsing, so that a ‘tear’ took many seconds to fall. My guess is I could hear some but not all these tiny births.”

Night Sky in Sine Saloum,Yandé Codou Sène(sung in Serer, the predominant language in the Sine Saloum region)

I was working on some of the last stages of the book in the Tambacounda region of Senegal (many of the “Methods of Transmission” sections were written there), so I tapped into the great tradition of Senegalese music. Yandé Codou Sène’s Night Sky in Sine Saloum begins with an incredible polyphonic invocation — voices and drums. This is where we feel the loss of liner notes in our new listening methods, but I’ve gathered that Yandé Codou Sène (1932-2010) was once Leopold Senghor’s official griot. This is her first full-length album, released when she was 65. I can’t help but wonder if she was, like other griots of the Senegambia region, buried in a baobab tree, though I was told Senghor put a stop to this tradition.

Into the Light, etc., Marisa Anderson

Basically anything by incredible guitarist Marisa Anderson, who I first heard opening for Xylouris White in Providence. I once had the pleasure of performing with her in a garage in Portland.

The Sacrificial Code, Kali Malone

Nearly two hours of pipe organ compositions that are vaguely churchy but agnostic, minimalist and moody. In the title piece, there’s a lower register that feels like the soul at that place where the world’s thick, wide rubber bands cross, or the interior omphalos, or the oracle buried in the dirt, and then an upper register that is the mind stepping in mid-air, tentatively finding its way through the material. Sometimes the pieces are a little scary, in the best way, as if dark ethereal earth ghosts are floating through them. You can sort of hear the deep rumble of the earth-heart, and the pieces are long. They’re kind of dirty and clean at the same time, the way you want the sound track in your dreams.

[*] “Bravo 20 is the largest of the four air-to-ground impact target ranges associated with Fallon Naval Air Station, the Navy’s ‘top gun’ training base nearby in Fallon, Nevada,” The Center for Land Use Interpretation tells us.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Eleni Sikelianos’s playlist for her poetry collection Make Yourself Happy

Eleni Sikelianos’s playlist for her memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and “master of mixing genres.” As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Susan Donovan Bernhard’s novel Westerly is a multi-generational epic that spans fifty years, three countries, and three generations of unforgettable women.

Heather Aimee O’Neill wrote of the book:

“In a story packed with as much secrecy as love, Westerly follows two generations of women as they move from war-torn Germany to an Irish village to mid-coast Maine across five decades. But the larger journey is one of learning to share our lives―our past and present truths―with those who are supposed to know us best, and trusting that they will still love us. An absolutely beautiful story of choosing honesty and forgiveness over secrets and shame.”

In her own words, here is Susan Donovan Bernhard’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Westerly:

Two German sisters are sent to foster care in Ireland, where they are separated by tragedy. WESTERLY follows one girl to the United States where she lives with a name and identity that are not her own. It’s a story of knowing yourself, expectation and longing, the shame that comes from harboring secrets, and ultimately the hard journey toward real forgiveness and authentic living. I don’t listen to music while I write. I build the playlist to set mood, to create a headspace where my characters can swim and dance and fight and do all the things complex characters do. Plus, as a person susceptible to ear worms, it’s a way for me to keep thinking about the novel even when I’m not actively working on it.

Love You For a Long Time by Maggie Rogers

Came in like a vision from the old west wind

All the songs I longlisted for WESTERLY were assigned to a character. I imagined Faye or Maeve or Molly listening to the song on the radio, singing along, hearing their own stories. But the moment I heard this song, I assigned it to me. Maybe it was at that point I started truly believing that this novel would be a book.

You know that I could never make this up
I found the reason I’m not givin’ it up

The journey to publication is scary and fraught, depressing and exhilarating, deflating and affirming. If writing is art, the art is the work and not the product. Still. To have it all bound into a physical book is like framing a painting. Characters from my first novel have stayed with me and these ones will as well. After all, I’ve loved them for a long time.

Babe, don’t you wanna see how far this thing can go?

The Benediction (A Good Woman) by Rose Cousins

Call me by my name and I will answer.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard this song. March 5, 2020. My mom’s 99^th birthday. I was walking on the beach in Chatham, MA on the first day of a writing retreat wondering what in the world this virus was and whether we would be able to get food in a week. I was struggling to understand the novel I was working on, what I wanted to write. Then I heard these lyrics about silence and interiority. I listened on repeat.

Listen and you’ll hear what I am saying
Feelings I have difficulty relaying
My silence isn’t absence, I’m just praying
I wanna be a good woman.

I made my way back to the house as the sun was going down. A pack of coyotes moved together across the grass and down to the shore. I burst into the house and played the song for my writing partners.

A strong and reliable daughter
A kind and understanding sister
A dear and attentive friend and lover
A girl with her heart on fire.

Love In Wartime by Birds of Chicago

I love quiet domesticity in the lyrics, the routine and wonder. There is something so human and flawed about the characters in this song. William and Faye both suffered through war and carry guilt and pain and a desire to forget and a desire to be loved and to love despite it all.

We are not made from metals hammered
We are lightning, clay and grammar
We’re the whispers in the dark when the night comes ’round
Yesterday and tomorrow
Keep our joy and our sorrow

Painted Blue by Sundy Best

Man, I love a broken character. And Conor O’Kane is broken and bitter and damaged. He’s a guy who knows how to hold a grudge. (The two of us might be related.)

Too bad you traded your love for your pride.

There’s a story in my family about my dad Tom and his brother Bill. The story goes that Uncle Bill came to my hometown to barhop and get drunk with my dad. The two of them got into some sort of brawl and spent the night in a jail cell sobering up. The next morning, the sheriff drove Uncle Bill to the town line and told him never to come back. And Uncle Bill, prideful and stubborn, swore he never would. Then my dad got mad because his brother wouldn’t come to visit him and he swore that, by God, he wouldn’t visit my Uncle Bill either. For maybe fifteen or twenty years they didn’t see each other. They lived 80 miles apart. I was 17 when my dad died and I met my Uncle Bill for the first time the next day. They looked so much alike I thought he was my father’s ghost.

I’ve been broke down and I’ve been fooled
By time and age and some by you
So I just lay here with a bottle on the floor

Why wouldn’t Conor just…? Why didn’t he tell William that…? Why didn’t my Uncle Bill just…? Why wouldn’t my dad pick up the phone and…? Because these Irishmen—real and fictional—held grudges like possessions. To give up the grudge would make them poor and weak. It was a game of chicken and my dad and his brother crashed into each other. For Conor O’Kane, giving up the grudge would have meant letting go of Fiadh. For my dad and Uncle Bill? I don’t know. But, to this day, I don’t forgive either of them for keeping me from knowing the two of them together. I am my father’s daughter after all.

So when the pain starts to creep in
And I just pour another shot again
So I don’t have to miss you anymore

Eyes to the Wind by The War On Drugs

So I’ll set my eyes to the wind
But it won’t be easy to leave it all again
Just a bit rundown here on the sea
There’s just a stranger livin’ in me

When I first started building the character of Maeve, I imagined a path for her that would lead to (spoiler alert) happiness. I had a friend in high school named Marla. Everyone loved Marla, wanted to be close to her, wanted to be her, even. This was the early 1980s and Marla was a star basketball player, a “tomboy,” and utterly cool. We kids were shockingly obtuse and cruel back then, ridiculing and mocking girls who were drawn into Marla’s orbit. Surely some of those girls were attracted to Marla more than they were to any boy. Surely some experienced the confusion of desire at a time when you just couldn’t be gay. Marla’s twin sister Joni, equally charismatic, was a literal beauty queen. Both sisters were insanely popular and beloved. Both girls had better and closer friends than me, people who knew their secrets and their pain. No one escapes high school unscathed, after all. Marla, though, carried the kind of pain that ultimately led to her taking her own life.

When I met you and I fell away again
Like a train in reverse down a dark road
Carrying the whole load just rattling the whole way home

At a class reunion in 1992, I talked to Marla about my life. I was living in San Francisco at the time, dating a guy who would eventually be my husband. Marla had come out by then and brought the woman she was dating to the reunion. We talked about San Francisco, what a great city it was, how open and adventurous and artistic and wild. I think that was the last time I saw her. Though we weren’t close, I was heartbroken by the news of her death. There was just something about her. When it came time to write the character of Maeve, I imagined Marla, confronting the demons that haunted her and coming out on the other side of the fight very much alive.

Nightflyer by Allison Russell

Molly is constantly in battle with herself, two things, fourteen things at once, all versions of herself vying for attention. She is The Morrigan, the triple goddess, a shapeshifter. Even her grandfather sees the warrior in her.

I’m the melody and the space between

The fire and the branch that’s burning

I’m each of his steps on the stairway
I’m his shadow in the door frame

Molly’s battle to get overcome the trauma of her childhood by owning it, literally wearing it, is so perfectly encapsulated in this song. I feel like it was written for her.

His soul is trapped in that room
But I crawled back in my mother’s womb
Came back out with my gold and my greens
Now I see everything
Now I feel everything…

Macushla by The Adler Brothers

She sings the song her dad would sing
Now he listens from above
It’s all gonna be okay
My macushla, my love.

Faye and Thomas have such a lovely and melancholy relationship, bound as they are by secrecy and loss. I found this searching for versions of the traditional Irish song. I love that it came to me so organically. And boy do I know that feeling of missing your dad.

Come Back by Pearl Jam

Please say, that if you hadn’t of gone now
I wouldn’t have lost you another way
From wherever you are
Oh-oh, oh-oh, come back

There’s a running theme for all the characters in WESTERLY of running away and returning home, of blame and sacrifice that is often misplaced and misapplied. Early on, I had an epigraph from Euripides. “Come back, even as a shadow, even as a dream.” I’ll take any piece of you, any version of you—you who I have lost, you who I long for, you, gone too soon or simply gone. Not long after my dad died, I dreamed that he came into the house like he’d never left. He hugged me, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close to him. In my dream, I imagined climbing into his shirt pocket. I woke up so sad but also so grateful that he came to me, even in a dream. I keep that now as a memory, as if it were real. Because aren’t dreams real?

And the days, they linger on
And every night, what I’m waiting for
Is the real possibility that I may meet you in my dreams
Sometimes you’re there and you’re talking back to me
Come the morning I could swear you’re next to me
And it’s okay

Carry Me by The Secret Sisters

What if this song had three narrators instead of one?

Molly: I’m a long way from home
I feel the weight in my bones
I’m tired like a sinner
I’m cold and my money’s all gone

Maeve: I’m ashamed of the things that I’ve done
Feeling love is like facing a gun
The closer you get
The farther that I’m gonna run

Faye: If I keep on hiding, how will I be known?
I keep telling myself that I’m better alone

On a roadtrip through Ireland in 2019, we got turned around in the Wicklow Mountains and ended up at a place called The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. The organization is housed in an old barracks that has had many functions during Ireland’s turbulent history including as an ignominious reform school operated by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Post-World War II, the Irish Red Cross housed German orphans here before fostering them with families throughout Ireland. I’d never heard anything about the program, dubbed Operation Shamrock, but these little German sisters appeared to me like an apparition. I pictured them stepping off a bus in a foreign land, the sound of bombs still bursting in their ears. How strange that must have been. WESTERLY was born from that wrong turn in the Wicklow Mountains. That the place is now one for peace and reconciliation seems especially apt.

I’m worn and I’m weathered
But your love is the shelter I need.

Fly by Nick Drake

Please, give me a second grace.
Please tell me your second name.

I’ve been a fan of Nick Drake for so long. I don’t remember when I first started thinking about this song, about Faye and Sela, about second chances, about how you don’t want to wait too long to ask for forgiveness or to grant it. But it’s always been there.

Now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done
Come, come sit down on the fence in the sun

You and Me On The Rock by Brandi Carlisle

I already spoiled that Maeve’s ending would be happy so here she is, with Wendy. (And it makes me so happy to imagine that in some alternate universe, Marla got there, too.)

I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through.

Front Porch by Joy Williams

Say my name through the screen door
Come on back to the front porch

I hear this song and I think of all the women in WESTERLY, the headwinds and tailwinds that buffeted them and nudged them along, how they fell and rose. I wish I could bring all my characters together (and all the people who inspired them) so we could sit on the front porch at the farmhouse in Maine and have a cold beer as the sun goes down.

Whatever you’ve done, it doesn’t matter
‘Cause darlin’ we’re all a little splintered and battered.

Donoughmore by Rose Cousins

In the green of Ireland, oceans in between
I think of you again and what all of this means.

Rose Cousins bookends, perfect for Faye and Molly and Maeve, for Fiadh and Gisela and Elisabeth, all of them making room for love.

Heart be with me now,
As I make room for love.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Susan Bernhard’s playlist for her novel Winter Loon

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Susan Donovan Bernhard is the author of Winter Loon, an Amazon bestseller and winner of the Boston Authors Club’s Julia Ward Howe Prize for fiction. She is a Mass Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a GrubStreet Novel Incubator program graduate, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and graduated from the University of Maryland. She now lives and writes in Massachusetts.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Catriona Silvey’s novel Vervain Hollow is a masterfully unnerving and engaging work of literary horror.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“An otherworldly portrayal of fanaticism and evangelism with an expansive moral lesson about the dangers that lie in sacrificing one’s identity to fit in…Silvey’s exploration of what drives people into cults is sensitive yet poignant and speaks to the modern moment. This thoughtful and haunting novel is an excellent addition to the growing number of regional gothics.”

In her own words, here is Catriona Silvey’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Vervain Hollow:

Before Vervain Hollow was a book, it was a playlist.

Laura, the protagonist of the novel, used to be in a cult. Drawn in by charismatic leader Vervain and his promises of impossible power, she vied for his favor until a fire destroyed the cult, the sprawling house they lived in, and apparently, Vervain himself. Two years later, hearing Vervain might still be alive, Laura returns to the ruin in search of him.

From the moment I imagined the novel’s opening scene – Laura venturing back to the burnt-out shell of the cult’s former residence – songs started collecting around it. By the time I had a playlist I was happy with, I knew the broad beats of the plot. I knew Laura was still devoted to Vervain, more than two years after his apparent death. I knew that Vervain was no fraud: the power he had promised Laura was real, but his motives and his nature were very different from what she had imagined. I knew that Laura’s arc would function as an allegory of the ways in which real-world systems shape our behaviors, define what we see as real, and make us complicit in the harm done to those we love.

Apart from a couple of songs I substituted in during revisions, the playlist below is the same one that propelled me through the first draft. It’s a mix of songs I’ve loved for so long that they formed part of the subconscious material for the novel, and songs I discovered serendipitously along the way. If the playlist has a mood, it’s emotional, obsessive, and unsettling, much like the book itself.

‘Hey Jupiter (Dakota Version)’ by Tori Amos

Laura starts the novel in a place of heartbreak. The cult that gave her life meaning, the leader she adored, the power he promised her, are all ashes in her past. Until the moment she hears that Vervain might still be alive, she is hopelessly adrift in her grief.

As the title suggests, ‘Hey Jupiter’ is a breakup song turned cosmic, chronicling the end not only of a relationship but of a framework for understanding the world. The programmed drums and vibrating bass of the single version add a menacing edge, hinting that this longing isn’t leading anywhere good. The music video, featuring Amos sitting impassive while the room burns around her, also evokes the fire that destroyed the cult’s residence, and the part of Laura that never escaped the flames.

‘Before the Fire’ by Santigold

Santigold is a fixture on my book playlists: her songs are so specific, so unexpected, and so evocative that they always open up possibilities for me as a writer. They are also uniformly bangers, and ‘Before the Fire’ is no exception. Over a driving beat and haunted, repeating backing vocals, the lyrics tell a story of trauma, numbness, and help that comes too late. The refrain, “I was burned before the fire”, applies to Laura and to many of her fellow cultists, wounded in ways that make them ripe for Vervain’s manipulation.

‘Lion’s Share’ by Wild Beasts

I love and mourn Wild Beasts. Before disbanding in 2018, they perfected the expression of a uniquely slinky, sideways masculinity, like if Kate Bush happened to be four men from the northwest of England. Pairing throbbing bass with tinkling piano, ‘Lion’s Share’ is both seductive and subtly horrifying: “I love you all the more for every fault/They’re how I’d gotten in, they’re how I cracked the vault”. Predatory in the best way, it perfectly evokes both the attractive face Vervain presents to Laura and the menace lurking underneath.

‘De Selby (Part 2)’ by Hozier

While I was revising the book, I got obsessed with Hozier’s album Unreal Unearth, and with this song in particular. The title is a reference to Flann O’Brien’s surreal, horrifying novel The Third Policeman, and the lyrics are appropriately disturbing: “What you live in/Darling, it finds a way to live in you”. It makes me think of the relationship between Vervain, the house that embodies him, and Laura; more broadly, it echoes the novel’s wider themes of how the structures we’re raised with become a part of us.

‘Take Over’ by Tom Rosenthal

Honestly, I feel bad about including this one. In its original context on the album Fenn, ‘Take Over’ is a tender ode to seeing the world through the eyes of your child. In the context of Vervain Hollow, the invitation to “take me over” has a much darker connotation: Vervain’s ultimate goal is to possess and control Laura’s body. Still, I couldn’t resist keeping this sweet, gorgeous piano ballad on the playlist: the gap between the delicate beauty of the music and the horror of the lyrics (when read in a literal way) evokes the dissonance between Laura’s blissed-out fugue state and the reality of what she’s inviting.

‘Rorschach Baby’ by Ryn Weaver

I first heard of Ryn Weaver when a reader included her song ‘New Constellations’ on a playlist for my book Meet Me in Another Life. It felt like serendipity, then, when her new single ‘Rorschach Baby’ came up on my recommendations as I was revising Vervain Hollow and I discovered it was spookily perfect for the book. Carried along by electronic urgency and an anxious, schizophrenic rhythm, the lyrics read like a synopsis of Laura’s journey. In short: try and tell me this song is about anything other than psychological warfare with a trickster faux-god and I will refuse to believe you.

‘Cannibal’s Hymn’ by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

There’s a chapter late in Vervain Hollow where Laura sees past events from Vervain’s perspective and finally comes to understand his predatory, consuming nature. That chapter was a lot of fun to write, much as I imagine this song was. The crunchy drums, insistent up-and-down bass riff, and Cave’s purring baritone combine to create a song that’s sexy and disturbing in equal measure. When Cave croons, “If you’re gonna dine with them cannibals/Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten”, it’s hard to resist the urge to sing along. (As long as the neighbors aren’t listening.)

‘Deeper Devastation’ by Jesca Hoop

Once Laura understands Vervain’s true nature, she recognizes her complicity in his crimes. ‘Deeper Devastation’ is a song about a reckoning with the self, and with the flaw at the heart of us all: “You cannot trust a human being/To do the right thing”.

Like Santigold, Jesca Hoop writes songs that wrestle with hard-to-define but resonant emotions. Musically, she doesn’t sound like anyone else: here, her rich voice floats in a mournful soundscape of Twin Peaks-esque guitar and backing vocals like ritual chants. In the novel, this song corresponds to the lowest point of Laura’s arc, when she can’t see a way past her own frailty.

‘Dear Wormwood’ by The Oh Hellos

In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Wormwood is a demon tasked with tempting a human to sin. This song is a defiant reply from human to demon, acknowledging its dark influence and refusing to succumb.

Most of Vervain Hollow is written in first person direct address, with Laura referring to Vervain as “you”. It’s a marker of devotion, of longing for his recognition, that signals how bound up in him she’s become. This song corresponds to the moment when she stops. Recognizing Vervain for what he is, she sends him back to the third person: “I know who you are now/And I name you my enemy”.

‘Trellick Tower’ by Emmy The Great

Emmy The Great excels at telling a profound and complete story in under five minutes: something I can only envy, as I’m incapable of even attempting that in fewer than eighty thousand words. Here, it’s a breakup story about an ex-lover who left because he found God. The song weaves together the titular London tower block and the story of Rapunzel, placing the lost love impossibly out of reach: “Can I spend my life trying to climb you?”

For me, this song stands for Laura’s reluctance to turn her back on Vervain, even after all she’s learned. Letting him go means letting go of the power he granted her, conditional and toxic as it was, and of the idea of herself as chosen. ‘Trellick Tower’ contains one of the foundational lines for Laura’s character, and one of the most beautiful lyrics I’ve ever heard: “And I think relics ache for when the saint had breath/They miss the thing that changed them”.

‘Vesuvius’ by Sufjan Stevens

At the climax of Laura’s internal battle, she must burn away any part of Vervain that remains and reclaim what’s left of herself. ‘Vesuvius’ describes such a spiritual showdown, a scouring of fire that must be undergone, no matter the pain: “I’d rather be burned than be living in debt”.

Starting with a simple muted piano, the song builds gradually, adding discordant electronics, glitchy beats, and layered vocals that reflect the opposition between “ghost” and “host” that runs through the lyrics. When I listen to it, I think of Laura wandering her own tangled mental landscape, collecting the fragments of herself back into a whole.

‘Horizon’ by Aldous Harding

The horizon is a recurring motif in Vervain Hollow. At the beginning of the novel, it stands for the infinite possibilities that paralyze Laura, pushing her toward the strictures and control of the cult. By the end, the horizon has changed in her perception, becoming a symbol of freedom.

Another off-kilter breakup song, ‘Horizon’ features cryptic lyrics that suggest rather than explain. The chorus, “Here is your princess/And here is the horizon”, gives me shivers: there’s so much in there about refusing others’ definitions, choosing instead something that is open and scary and yet to be known. It expresses the end of Laura’s journey, in a way that carried through to the pages of the book. This song was always the last song on the playlist, and the last word of the novel is “horizon”.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Catriona Silvey is the author of the international bestseller Meet Me in Another Life and Love and Other Paradoxes. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in Scotland and England. After collecting an unreasonable number of degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Edinburgh, she settled in Edinburgh where she lives with her husband and children.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Alex DiFrancesco’s post-dystopian novel-in-stories The Grief Shop is inventive and enveloping.

Never Angeline Nørth wrote of the book:

“Sharp, inventive, and deeply human, The Grief Shop is a look at how emotions make us who we are and the way those same feelings link us together. Simultaneously zooming in to the personal and out to the global, DiFrancesco is an astute observer of how we all tick”

In their own words, here is Alex DiFrancesco’s Book Notes music playlist for their novel-in-stories The Grief Shop:

The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World takes place after “the tragedy” kills ⅓ of the earth’s population, and renders the rest clinically emotionally numb. The novel-in-stories follows Gemma, who works a lot of odd job hustles as the world recalibrates – most of them speculative. She works in a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a funeral home, and more. Gemma went numb long before the tragedy due to trauma in her young life, and much of the book revolves around her trying to feel again as the rest of the world settles into its numbness.

The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man) – Car Seat Headrest

Since an unnamed catastrophe hangs over the book, it only makes sense that this song would open the book’s playlist. I learned about Car Seat Headrest from a 20-something coworker at a bakery I worked in last year, and fell in love with their bombastic indie sound.

Another World – Anohni

I first heard Anohni’s voice on the cover album of Leonard Cohen’s songs, I’m Your Man, singing a perfect version of “If It Be Your Will.” Anohni’s mournful list of things she will miss from the old world, but her longing for a new world seemed to encapsulate Gemma’s longing for things lost and her faint hope for things to come.

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

I spent a fair amount of time in my youth listening to classic rock, so when I thought of a world that was completely devoid of feeling, it seemed fitting to put this song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall on the playlist. There’s been some debate through time about whether this was a song about doctors getting a sick lead singer ready for the stage, or heroin, but in either case, it speaks to the numbness of the world in The Grief Shop.

Search and Destroy – The Stooges

The main character of The Grief Shop, Gemma, while adjusting to the new world with ⅓ of the population killed in the tragedy, takes up crafts. One of the crafts she does is cross-stitch hoops with inspirational images and Iggy Pop lyrics on them. “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,” and such.

Fuck All the Perfect People – Chip Taylor and the New Ukranians

Gemma is pretty jaded, and so is this Chip Taylor song about all the people sleepwalking through life, and how they can all go to hell.

I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones

Gemma spends a fair amount of time in the book drinking with her best friend, Xander. The numbing desire behind that is very reminiscent of this punk song.

zombie girl – Adrianne Lenker

From the moment I heard the lyric “vacant as a closed down fair” in this song, I knew that it was something that Gemma could relate to.

Road To Joy – Bright Eyes

At a certain point in the book, Gemma moves towards feeling again. This 2000s Bright Eyes song, based on the “Ode to Joy” isn’t about an uncomplicated road to feeling, so it seemed fitting. “I read the body count out of the paper/ and now it’s written all over my face.”

White Elephant – Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when I first started writing The Grief Shop, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were writing Carnage, which (coincidentally!) was also about a post-disaster world. This song from it is, hands down, my favorite Nick Cave track in about a decade. One reviewer of it wrote something along the lines of how long it had been since Nick threatened to shoot us in the face, and how nice it was to return to that.

How Sad, How Lovely – Connie Converse

Connie Converse and her legend play a huge part in The Grief Shop. She’s idolized by one of the characters, which leads to thoughts about what hero-worship of legendary artists really means. This song, ostensibly about watching a sunset, seems like the perfect close for this playlist, and not just because it’s about endings.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their memoir Breaking the Curse

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their story collection Transmutation

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their novel All City

Alex DiFrancesco’s playlist for their essay collection Psychopomps

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Alex DiFrancesco is the author of the dystopian novel All City, the story collection reflecting trans realities Transmutation, and the memoir Breaking the Curse (2024). About their debut story collection, Patrick Cottrell wrote in the New York Times: “At the affective core of Transmutation is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another’s pain, real and imagined.” They are the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2022, and their novel All City was the first awards finalist by a transgender author for the Ohioana Book Awards in its eighty-year history. They served as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications in Tennessee, and edited LGBTQIA+ non-fiction for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Their work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Pacific Standard, Eater, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. DiFrancesco lives in Philadelphia.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Meg Charlton’s novel Voyagers is a debut both compelling and moving as it explores the possibilities of great friendship and extraterrestrial life.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“In her debut, Charlton writes with the elegant prose, cohesive plotlines, and believable characters of a seasoned author….The feeling of uncertainty and doubt around their experience gives depth to the alien-abduction trope, making this read as a blend of sci-fi and literary fiction… Interrogating the importance of friendship, what friends owe each other, and what makes a narrative true, this novel will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin who enjoy the nuance of conspiracy.”

In her own words, here is Meg Charlton’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Voyagers:

In Voyagers, two six-year-olds, Alex and Ana, mysteriously vanish for two days in the late 1990s. The incident is interpreted as an alien abduction and makes the two kids a) famous and b) inseparable, until their divergent beliefs about the truth of their experience tear them apart as teenagers. Now adults, they reunite when the world seems to be on the verge of actual, global first contact with aliens. Voyagers is about many things — aliens, of course, but also fame and faith. Class and conspiracy. Truth and memory and the nature of reality itself. But above all, it is about friendship, that most durable yet delicate of bonds, and what it takes to maintain that intimacy across vast distances of time and space. 

For every project, I make a playlist. I rarely listen to it while I write, but I use it as a towline back into the mood, characters and world of the story. I worked on this project over about five or six years, so the playlist contracted and expanded many times! Some of the songs are literally about UFOs or the fallibility of memory or the fraying of a previously unbreakable bond. (I can be pretty on the nose with my song selections!) But others were selected for more oblique reasons. Hopefully, they capture the mood of both the book itself and the mindset I was in while writing it.

Door of the Cosmos – Sun Ra

I said I never listen to the songs on my playlist while writing, but this is the exception that proves the rule. I listened to a lot of free jazz while writing this book, but Sun Ra was my favorite, for obvious reasons. Sun Ra’s visionary music and Afrofuturist philosophy was born out of an alien encounter, which transported him to Saturn. After the encounter, he dropped out of college and ended up pursuing music, to all our benefit. Sun Ra’s music, for me, is always bursting with freaky joy and wondrous possibility. For Voyagers, I wanted to approach space as a place (to paraphrase the title of Sun Ra’s own film) and alien contact as an event from a mindset of fear but of thrilling, radical transformation.

California – EMA

That opening line — Fuck California / You made me boring — could be a mantra for either one of my main characters, Alex or Ana, who both believe, in their own ways, that their lives were irrevocably altered (for better and for worse) by their childhood experience in the California desert. This song has such an angsty, angry adolescent sound to it that I really love, earnest and plaintive and haunting. It sounds just like how I wanted the teenage sections of Alex and Ana’s lives to read.

Take Me Home – Phil Collins

This song has such a wonderful, shimmery menace to it. Apparently, Phil Collins was inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s interesting to listen to the song through that lens. But I always heard it as a song of incredible yearning for answers, of all kinds, and for the imagined liberation they might bring. For me, it always made me think of Alex and his own desperate belief that “the truth is out there” if only he could find it. That final plea — “take, take me home / ‘cause I don’t remember” — might be a little on the nose for Alex’s situation. But when I wanted to drop into the real ache of his search for answers, I’d listen to this song. 

The Passenger – Iggy Pop

Sorry, but I think the multiverse is the most damaging science fiction device since sentient AI! Based as it might be in real theories of quantum mechanics, it often (not always) ends up perpetuating this view of our lives as a form of consumer choice: If I’d just made this one discreet change, then everything would be different. I was interested in exploring the dark side of that multiverse mindset in Voyagers. Alex is obsessed with the idea that his life has been thrown “off course” somehow. But what if we accepted that the life we live is the only course that was ever set for us? What if we surrendered the idea of ever being in the driver’s seat? Alex spends a good chunk of the novel as a literal passenger, but in a bigger sense, he spends his whole life as one. I think we all do. “The Passenger” is a perfect song about letting the world wash over you and the exhilaration that comes with letting go of our need for control. 

Hey Moon – John Maus

I listened to a lot of John Maus when I was working on this book. His music makes me feel like I’m driving at night through LA. I don’t have the sonic vocabulary to explain why it gives me that sensation, but it does! (While the majority of the book takes place in New York City or in the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles still felt like the novel’s home city.) But “Hey Moon” also feels, on a more literal level, like such a lovely song about loneliness and looking for companionship among the celestial bodies. So much of this book is about asking whether or not we are alone, in the universe or in our lives. I think this song offers a beautiful, ambiguous answer — maybe there’s no one out there but the moon but that doesn’t mean we need to feel lonely. 

Series of Dreams – Bob Dylan

I first heard this song in the trailer for Bombay Beach, a beautiful film about a community living on the Salton Sea in the Sonoran Desert. Because of how I first encountered it, I always associated “Series of Dreams” with the desert and the Southern California desert in particular, where some of the most pivotal sections of Voyagers take place. The extremity of that landscape makes any bit of human civilization feel so alien and dreamlike, which is maybe why this song evokes the desert so well, its sweeping instrumentation under non-sequitor lyrics that feel like snippets of real dreams. 

When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky – Lucius

Another Dylan, but a cover! I tried to restrain myself from doing too many on the nose musical cues — which is to say: “songs with space-related keywords in the title” — but I couldn’t resist this one. My husband sent me this version when I was feeling very stuck with the novel and then the writing completely unlocked for me after listening to this song. Something about the way it builds from that mischievous opening guitar to this plaintive, huge final chorus echoed the structure of the story, as did the lyrics: “it won’t matter who loves who / you’ll love me or I’ll love you” felt like a perfect summation of Alex and Ana’s complicated but unbreakable bond. And I liked to imagine that opening line — “look out across the fields / see me returning” — playing over a dark screen at the end of a film version of Voyagers. 

After the Gold Rush – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris

I love this version of a Neil Young classic. Saddest song ever written about interplanetary colonization! But really, it’s about the destruction of our own little spaceship Earth, “the only home we’ve ever known” as Carl Sagan put it. Any conversation about aliens is inextricably linked with reconsidering our relationship to our own planet. In films, the invading extraterrestrials usually serve to unite humanity, petty differences cast aside in the name of species-wide unity against a common outside threat. It’s a goofy trope, but there’s something quite profound about it. 

I Think UR a Contra – Vampire Weekend

Alex grows up in a very preppy Manhattan milieu, with all of its attendant seductions and snobbery and small cruelties, and who better to evoke that than Vampire Weekend? But I also picked this particular track because it speaks to that awful rug-pull of betrayal when someone you believed you were close with reveals themselves as a stranger. Alex and Ana’s central conflict — over the nature of the truth and of their own moral superiority — could be summed up with the song’s chorus: “ “I think ur a contra / I think that you’ve lied / don’t call me a contra / ‘til you’ve tried.” 

It’s All Coming Back to Me Now – Céline Dion

This is the only track in this playlist that is actually featured in the book—Someone plays it on the piano at a pivotal party Alex and Ana attend in the hills of Silverlake as teenagers — in a moment meant to show the nimbleness of Ana’s charisma and Alex’s awe at its power. I love the insane scope of this song — personally, I have a soft spot for both Céline and power ballads — and its instant shot of late 90s nostalgia. Hopefully Voyagers plunges readers back in that era, too. 

I Know the End – Phoebe Bridgers

When I was writing this book, I told a friend that I wanted it to feel like listening to Punisher. If I accomplished even a drop of that for someone, I will have done my job. This song in particular mirrors the arc of the book, both lyrically and structurally. But that’s all I’ll say — No spoilers! 

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Meg Charlton lives in New York City. Voyagers is her first novel.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Part personal travelogue, part guidebook, and part advocacy guide, Lindsey Danis’s (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel is an empowering book for queer travelers

The Rumpus wrote of the book:

“Danis offers an abundance of resources, concrete information, and helpful suggestions for queer travelers, but doesn’t propose a one-size-fits all approach. They make space for readers of differing races, ethnicities, abilities, identities, personalities, and values; never getting prescriptive about the ‘right’ way to travel. (Obviously a queer book makes room for possibility.) In fact, each chapter ends with a list of prompts and questions so readers can reflect on what matters most to them as individual travelers.”

In their own words, here is Lindsey Danis’s Book Notes music playlist for their book (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel:

(Out) On the Road is part travel memoir, part guide, packed with all the things I didn’t even know to Google when I set off on my earliest adventures. The songs on this playlist kept me company while I researched and wrote.

Pulled from my own travels, these songs have defined pivotal moments at various life stages, from childhood to teen years and my emerging queerness, to the first trips I took independently and the journeys that have shaped me the most. The best stories are shared in my book, so I won’t spoil them here. This playlist transports me to the dining room of my childhood house, or the interior of my beloved Volvo station wagon, which was covered in bumper stickers, or expat bars in dusty alleyways and the shared connection those spaces provide.

“Graceland,” Paul Simon

Like the boy in the song, I am a child of divorce. This song soothed the pain of being different for reasons beyond my control. When I drove cross-country, years later, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit Graceland, in search of the song’s promised redemption.

“La Louisiane,” Poisson Rouge

In Lafayette, Louisiana (state #47), there wasn’t much to do at night but drink and Hideaway on Lee was the obvious place. That’s where I heard this haunting anthem to Louisiana’s disappearing Francophone culture for the first time. The song is about a marginalized community resisting erasure, and the parallels to queerness were obvious.

“Heart of Gold,” Neil Young

This song followed me across Thailand and Laos from the nomad hub of Chiang Mai to Si Phan Don–4,000 Islands–a remote river archipelago near the Cambodian border. Its introspective yearning feels so obviously a backpacker’s anthem, but what can I say? I love it.

“A Horse With No Name,” America

In heavy rotation on my first cross-country road trip, this song transports me to the desert Southwest. After watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon and hiking down into it a bit, so we could say we did, I drove through Petrified Wood National Forest to Albuquerque. As we drove east, we periodically stopped and gathered dirt, collecting portions of America in plastic bags as if this act of archiving could make America belong to us. For years, I kept that dirt in glass soda bottles with the location marked on the bottom. It’s long gone now, but I recall the colors: deep rich red, bruised-purple, golden sand, and the simple love I had then for a land that hasn’t always loved me back.

“Run-Around,” Blues Traveler

One of two tracks that played on repeat on the trip I took to Egypt and Israel. I was fourteen and spent half my time being moody and introspective and the other half enchanted by traces of ancient civilizations.

“America,” Simon & Garfunkel

YEARNING, pt. 1.

“American Music,” Violent Femmes

McDonald’s fries and coke with no ice in Cairo, drag queens lip syncing to Lady Gaga in Phnom Penh, Neil Young on repeat—America’s biggest export is our culture, including American music. Being American, I didn’t realize the cultural hegemony in this until a good friend, who was an international student, pointed it out to me. To be an American traveler is to find traces of home everywhere; to be understood because the world has learned your native tongue, and to see all of this as normal.

This song reminds me of the soft power expressed within the world’s love of American music—the tender hope for the unfulfilled promises this country was founded on—and the cultural myopia of most Americans. Too many of us don’t know our own history, never mind anybody else’s.

“Uncle John’s Band,” Indigo Girls

The second song that played on repeat the summer I spent in Israel and Egypt. I’d never heard it before then, didn’t realize it was a cover, and had never listened to the Grateful Dead, but over the monthlong adventure this song wormed its way into my heart and head.

Tracking it down back home took the sort of sleuthing I would later apply to figuring out if my crushes were into women. I faintly remember requesting the CD through an interlibrary loan then promptly burning myself a copy on cassette.

“Land of Canaan,” Indigo Girls

YEARNING, pt. 2 (sapphic era): It’s just the London skyline telling me you’re not mine.

The live version of this song is introduced with sly humor as “a rock and roll song” and the audience scream-sings along in a way that evokes lesbian nostalgia. (Out) On the Road is about travel, obviously, and finding the places where we fit, both within ourselves and within the wider world. Part of that is letting go, as this song reminds me.

“Born on a Train,” The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields’ alt-country album The Charm of the Highway Strip is an old favorite, this song most of all. It spoke to my wandering heart the same way that On the Road did, when I read it in high school, assuaged by Kerouac’s misfit crew and the glimpses of queer lives sprinkled in its pages.

“Reno Dakota,” The Magnetic Fields

Brokenhearted, at a crossroads in my life, and lost in the swamps of Florida, I fantasized about starting a Magnetic Fields cover band. I’d learn ukulele and sing all of Claudia Gonson’s songs, including this one, and perhaps one day, this would make the ex I couldn’t get out of my head fall back in love with me.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

An avid chronicler of her many travels, Lindsey Danis has visited all fifty states, plus Puerto Rico, and twenty-eight countries. Her travel writings have appeared in publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Fodor’s, Business Insider, USA Today, The Albany Times-Union, Longreads and Eater. Lindsey’s essays have received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. In 2021, Lindsey founded Queer Adventurers, a travel blog for LGBTQ+ people. Lindsey received a BA in English from Vassar College and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and lives in Upstate New York.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Stephen O’Connor’s novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves powerfully explores the personal price of fascism.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“O’Connor offers a lucid and chilling view into the rise of fascism. . . . It’s a knockout.”

In his own words, here is Stephen O’Connor’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves:

When I was in middle school, my mother, distressed that I read almost nothing but science fiction and comic books, handed me the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Franz Kafka, published in 1952, the year of my birth. She recommended I start with “The Metamorphosis,” presumably because she thought a story about a young man who has turned into an insect would be close enough to science fiction to hook me. While I was definitely intrigued, I lacked sufficient confidence in my mother’s opinion to commit to the novella-length “The Metamorphosis,” and so I started with the much shorter “A Country Doctor.” That story hit me like a hurricane, its every image so fantastically unexpected, evocative, and resistant to interpretation that I hardly knew what to make of anything that happened, yet felt I was constantly discovering crucial truths. It is possible that, even before I reached the story’s deeply resonant and eternally mysterious final image, I had conceived the desire to write stories myself that would astound and perplex readers as a means of enabling them to engage more deeply with their own lives.

I am not sure why this back-alley route to enlightenment instantly became so central to my literary aesthetics—although it is true that I find any story that leaves me knowing exactly what happened and how to interpret it dull and forgettable. I vastly prefer fiction that doesn’t surrender its mysteries, and so serves as a springboard to ever multiplying revelations. There is, I am sure, a chicken-or-the-egg relationship between my love for “A Country Doctor” and these aesthetic predilections, but, in the final analysis, they don’t explain why I felt so deeply at home in an imaginative space where nothing is definite or fully explicable, and everything is ominous. Only recently, as I have been considering another tendency in my writing, have I come to a possible explanation for why I find this weird space so much like real life.

The protagonists in both my fiction and nonfiction narratives—including my memoir—are almost always people who try to do the right thing and fail. Many of these characters are well-meaning idiots, or the perpetrators of only minor failures, but some, like Thomas Jefferson, the co-protagonist of my last novel, are capable of unforgivable wrongdoing, even as they also have compelling virtues. I have long known I am drawn to such characters because of my father, whom I loved and respected, even though he was an alcoholic and perversely committed to his own destruction—which is to say that he was someone I could never make sense of, someone who seemed exactly as deserving of my contempt as of my love, and thus that I had been born into a world in which the abiding “truth” was an ominous indefiniteness, to which perplexity was the most honest and realistic response.

Günter Zeitz, the protagonist of my new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, is a psychoanalyst, as was my father, but the ambiguity of his moral nature is more a matter of context than character. He is compassionate and tolerant; he wants to help his patients; he tries hard to understand their points of view and remain unjudgmental. In ordinary circumstances, such traits would make Günter a good man, but because he lives in Nazi Germany, these virtues are the road to hell. The only way he or any Aryan German could survive the Third Reich with their decency intact was to oppose fascism with such ferocity as to make their death all but certain—a degree of moral fortitude that Günter, only an ordinarily brave man, finds all but impossible to summon up.

1. “Wiegala,” written by Ilse Weber, sung by Anne Sofie von Otter

Ilse Weber, a Czech musician and children’s book writer, was sent to Theresienstadt with her husband Willi and their son Tommy in 1942, and reportedly composed this lullaby to sing to Tommy and the children in the camp’s hospital, where she worked. After Willi was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Weber became so unhappy that she asked if she and her son might also be sent to the camp. Her request was granted and, minutes after they descended from the train at Auschwitz, she and Tommy were herded into the gas chamber, without ever even glimpsing Willi. I have decided to start my playlist with this song partly because I feel it conveys the moral foundation of my novel: that tender and hopeful optimism so essential to trust, love, and kindness. But I have also chosen it because Weber’s adherence to that very optimism made her unable to comprehend, despite her having endured eleven years of brutal antisemitism and two years in a concentration camp, that the industrial-scale atrocity we now call the Holocaust was even possible. Although a grotesque proportion of the German populace were more than happy to abide by the Final Solution, a great many people shared Weber’s incapacity to grasp what was happening before their eyes, an incapacity partly due to pure innocence, but mostly, I believe, to self-deception, a phenomenon explored at length in my novel.

2. “Daydreaming,” written and performed by Radiohead

There is an absurd aspect to the aspiration expressed in my book’s title, for how can it possibly make sense to want to be the person you already are? But the “self” referred to in the title is not so much the person one is, as the entity referred to in the phrase “my true self,” or in the declaration, “that’s not who I really am.” These are idealized selves—versions of who we are minus a few of our weaknesses. Despite Günter’s only ordinary courage, a moment comes when he thoughtlessly takes an action that causes many people to think him heroic, and for the remainder of the novel, he is torn between the desire to become that heroic self and his conviction that it would be wrong to take credit for virtues he does not possess. Günter, like all of my morally compromised protagonists, does not arise solely out of my inability to  arrive at an unequivocal moral judgment of my father (or myself), but also out of my uncertainty about idealism, a mode of thought that can be both an inspiration to do the right thing and a means of concealing one’s moral failures, even from oneself. The minimalist lyrics of Radiohead’s “Daydreaming” present idealism as inherently sorrowful and dangerous. “Dreamers…never learn,” we are told. They go “Beyond the point/Of no return,” until “it’s too late/The damage is done.”

3. “Lili Marleen,” written by Hans Leip and Norbert Schultze, performed by Marlene Dietrich

Although the struggle against authoritarianism looms large in We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, much of the novel concerns the passionate but tortured and ultimately doomed love of Günter and his wife Josine. While he is a gentile and she Jewish, they are both atheists, entirely detached from the religions they were born into. So, in 1924, when they meet in Sigmund Freud’s waiting room (Günter being Freud’s student, Josine his patient), it is possible for them both to think that they are, in Josine’s words “the same.” History, of course, will dramatically invalidate that assessment, though the problems that arise within their marriage have more to do with Josine’s troubled past than the poisonous antisemitism that engulfs them. Late in the novel, Hannah, Günter and Josine’s daughter, is sitting on a mountainside in the Bavarian Alps and hears the melody of “Lili Marleen” played on an accordion, drifting up from a valley. To my mind, Marlene Dietrich’s classic rendition of this soldier’s lament for a lost love evokes the most beautiful elements of Günter and Josine’s tragic relationship.

4. “Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor,” &

5. “Pirate Jenny,” both by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, and sung, respectively, by C.K. Alexander and Ellen Greene

At a party following the January 1928 debut in Berlin of the theatrical adaptation of The Good Soldier Švejk, Günter falls into an awkward conversation with a solitary and depressed-looking man, about his own age, who turns out to be Bertolt Brecht. Perhaps only days later, Brecht and Kurt Weill begin writing The Threepenny Opera from which these two songs are taken. Both songs, the first comical, the second fiercely grim, render the nihilistic bitterness and despair that characterized so much of Weimar culture, and that, alas, not only inspired revolutionary art and music, but also the reactionary nationalism, bigotry, and violence of the Nazi Party. These songs are from the Public Theater’s 1977 production of the play that I saw at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which, as it happens, is not more than a three-minute walk from the Rambles, where, in the novel’s final pages, Günter and his dear friend and colleague, Edith Jacobson, come to an understanding of the deep trauma they share.

6. “Streets of Minneapolis,” written and performed by Bruce Springsteen

I started this novel the summer before Donald Trump was elected to his first term and finished it the summer before he was elected to his second. Maybe I too suffered a blend of innocence and self-deception, but during both summers, I found it impossible to believe that someone so manifestly cruel, ignorant, and out of control as Trump could be elected president. And so, twice over, this novel, like its protagonist, has been transformed by a shift of historical context. The transformation is not radical, however. I always intended that this book make clear the ways in which authoritarians exploit credulity, racism, and fear to seize control of a nation and enslave the very people they claim to be liberating. But originally, I saw that dynamic as part of a larger argument about the many ways human beings fail to recognize the true nature of their own lives, ideas, actions and loves. I hope that it will not be long before this is the primary way my readers and I again see my novel. But right now, I am deeply worried that this country is slipping into Nazi-style fascism, and so I am letting Bruce Springsteen give voice to my own fear and anger. But the presence of this song on my playlist also represents hope, as it wouldn’t have been possible in Nazi Germany for such a song to have been performed so frequently and heard by so many people.

7. “Peace Piece,” written and performed by Bill Evans

I learned so much as I wrote this book, especially as I went ever deeper into the hearts and minds of Günter, Josine, Hannah, and the novel’s two other important characters, Elke Havekost and Max Pfeiffer, and as I wrestled with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and tried to figure out how they contributed to and diverged from this book’s most essential themes. It was also endlessly fascinating to think about and render so many modes of feeling: curiosity, love, sexual desire, and parental joy, but also loneliness, fear, guilt, fury, and disgust. And maybe more than anything else, I loved the pops, sparkles, and hums that occurred between the words in every new sentence throughout the eight years of the novel’s surprising raveling, unraveling, and re-raveling. But there were also many times, often amid the book’s most crucial scenes and meditations, when writing became a torture, when I had to get up every fifteen minutes and walk around my apartment until my head and heart were clear enough of revulsion and despair that I might sit back down and continue. And so, I am ending this playlist with one of my favorite pieces of music: Bill Evans’s consummately sensitive and expansive improvisation. Listen to it in the dark, ideally lying down. Let Evans lead you into the vast and gentle interstices of his sensibility, his mind, his music, and this incomprehensible universe, which, despite its absolute indifference to every human wish, remains, essentially and always, astoundingly beautiful.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Stephen O’Connor’s playlist for his novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

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Stephen O’Connor is the author of seven books including two novels, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings and We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, and the short story collection Here Comes Another Lesson. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and his nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Nation, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

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